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Being precise vs being close enough? | ||
Tags: Dictionaries | Meaning of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3903 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes  Speaks: French | Message 1 of 20 06 December 2014 at 5:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I pride myself in knowing exactly what a word means in all its contexts. What I mean is, I've found that a good many dictionaries will translate a word that actually means something different, but could be translated as what they're saying it means.(Google translate does this quite a bit) Most of the time in say French I am good enough to know that X word does not exactly mean what the dictionary says (but could be considered adequate.) Am I being too nitpicky? Sometimes I will go way out the way to find a specific meaning of a word. I'm not doing this to be the best at anything it's just one of my personality flaws.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6587 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 20 06 December 2014 at 11:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Maybe you're just being too literal. For example in English/French, as far as I know there are many cognates where the meaning is similar but there's a more common/precise word that suits better.
But this discussion is too abstract without actual examples, really. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3903 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes Speaks: French | Message 3 of 20 06 December 2014 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I do have a tendency to be too literal. What I mean is sometimes a dictionary will say that for instance: que means that, while it does, that is not the only meaning, in French there are several words that have lots of meanings depending on circumstances, and sometimes it's hard to find exactly the right word that I'd like to use. Sometimes they do not have an equivalent, and that is fine, it's just annoying when you look up a word like "gaze" and get "regarder" when I'd like to say "star gazing" not "star watching." I hope that's a bit clearer. Gazing has a different meaning than watching to me. I still have a bit of difficulty with the more complicated french grammar, so that could be part of the issue as well. It could be that there is no French word for gaze and that is perfectly fine.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5522 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 20 06 December 2014 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Languages are messy, and bilingual dictionaries are no more trustworthy than a typical thesaurus. For example, let's look up "good" in a thesaurus. This gets us a huge list of results, including:
None of these words mean exactly the same thing: "Superb" is better than "acceptable", "positive" can also refer to mathematics and electricity, and "valuable" can refer to economic value. "Exceptional" can be used in the phrase "exceptional circumstances." Most bilingual dictionaries work like a thesaurus: They give you a bunch of words which mean more-or-less what you wanted, and it's up to you to decide which to use. But there are lots of little tricks and traps. Certain words mean special things in certain combinations. Here are some other famous examples in English:
…and so on. Native speakers know all this stuff because they hear and read the language constantly, and they pick up the patterns by osmosis. As a language learner, you might occasionally find an advanced learner's dictionary which explains this stuff and provides lots of example sentences. But when all else fails, you can always rely on exposure. Oh, and in answer to your question: Professional translators use a bunch of different expressions when translating "star gazing", including l'observation des étoiles, regarder les étoiles and admirer les étoiles. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6587 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 20 08 December 2014 at 12:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yeah I'd say it's more about collocations than precision. Star watching simply sounds weird in English, but that doesn't mean that another language lacks a better term for gazing etc.
And as emk hinted, many expressions are more than the sum of their parts. Especially between English and French (also Spanish, German), it's possible to find equivalents for larger phrases. (Just don't rely on google translate for that!) You may not find a clear answer but for example a thread at wordreference or the like, where native speakers disagree on which translation is better. Often there are several options that are interchangeable in some contexts but not others. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4629 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 6 of 20 08 December 2014 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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What you raise is the problem of literal translation. Although I don't share the view that there are words in some languages which cannot be translated, I think it is a fact that some words, and even more so expressions, do not necessarily have an equivalent in other languages.
A good example is the nuance between "efficient" and "effective". The Larousse onlnine English-French dictionary gives the following definitions:
But how do you then translate the following headline into French? Effective Vs. Efficient: Do You Know The Difference? So often, although a word can be more or less accurately translated into another language, certain nuances will almost always be lost in translation, except I guess for words describing very concrete objects or beings, like table, door, rose or swan. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5218 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 7 of 20 08 December 2014 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Depends on what you want. The more careful you want to be, the harder you have to work. Some people are comfortable using phrases that get your meaning across but are a bit off ("star looking" instead of "star gazing"). Some people aren't. If you're one of the latter, you'll have to put in more work. Either way's fine, depending on your goals. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6587 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 20 08 December 2014 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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But it's more about finding the appropriate equivalent of the whole phrase than of an individual part.
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